Timeline

My Contributions and Tools

Teammates

About the Project

TalKee is an app I designed to allow close friends connect conveniently. This is a course project for Interaction Design Studio course at CMU, and the final deliverables are hi-fi screens.

Why TalKee?

After conducting over 10 interviews, my team and I concluded one major communication problem between parents and adult children: parents don’t know the best time to contact their children. Also, when parents call at an inappropriate time, children find it intrusive.
Based on the problem, I developed the following personas and scenarios, which represents a majority of our interviewees.

CARL, 53, Seattle

Carl has a 19-year-old daughter, Lynne, who attends college in Pittsburgh.

"I miss Lynne, and sometimes worry about her being alone in a new city. What is she doing now?"

LYNNE, 19, Pittsburgh

Lynne is living away from home for the first time. She enjoys her freedom, but misses her family.

"I want to talk to my dad when he calls, but my schedule is full and I always receive calls during class or when I hang out with friends."

JACK, 56, Remote

Jack is an engineer who monitors the usage and efficiency of TalKee from dashboard.

"I need to quickly see how activity-recognition triggers are performing, and understand how people are using TalKee."

Using sensors to detect availability

We brainstormed ideas using smartphone sensors to detect availability. By combining location, acceleration, and surrounding sound level, it will provide a lot of context to make a reasonable judgement of a user's availability. So we used:

GPS+accelerometer+microphone

Red, Green, and Yellow.

It'd be easier to differentiate availability by colors. I created the following design language, and picked colors that are rich and vibrant, because they contain information.

Hi-Fi Prototypes

I made the interactive prototype with Origami.

We first made sketches with pen and paper, and wireframes with Balsamiq. Then I created the Hi-Fi prototypes with Photoshop after 5 iterations and critiques, and made the marketing campaigns.

What's the most unique feature of TalKee? TalKee allows you to set your own availability status, and get notification when someone becomes available. And there's more. Talkee provides availability graph, a data visualization of weekly availability trend. This helps you know your friends' availability even better.

Dashboard Design.

Finally I made the dashboard with different parameters. As dashboard monitor, Jack can view what are the triggers that change users' availability status, and what are users' responses. Are the theories and assumptions underlying the design true? Is the service being used in the way the team imagines?

process

UX Methods

Interviews
Affinity Diagramming
Prototyping

Next step
- Because it broadcasts one’s availability, TalKee is primarily used between close friends. If contact number grows, it'd be helpful to have contact list ordered by availability, or even use filters.
- Such concept could be used in other situations (business, etc.) where people need to know if it’s a good time to contact one another.
- Make it accessible to all users by adding other cues to broadcast availability, when users cannot tell the three colors apart.